We’ve come a long way since buying tickets for public hangings but our blood lust is never far below the surface
Last week, I went to Gloucestershire to watch the annual cheese rolling, an event at which people hurl themselves down a very steep hill after a wheel of double gloucester. This silly-sounding tradition began perhaps 600 years ago – a sort of Alton Towers for the 15th century – and now tends to be described in news reports as “quirky”, “quintessentially English”, or a day for “cheese lovers”. I went along expecting the atmosphere of a village fete: stalls, cheese themes, and half-interested spectators wandering about. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
What greeted us instead was a baying mob spread across six fields, a worked-up football crowd dropped into the Cotswolds. Grass all around was churned into mud, and before each race there was a full-throated chant you could hear three hamlets away. Nearest the action was a desperate struggle between neighbours to get closer still: perhaps 200 people had swarmed the steep woods on either side, clinging to branches, tramping through nettles, determinedly pushing past each other for a better view. What were they there to see? You realised straight away. They were there to see broken legs and arms.
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